Now is the time just after the time of that long windup, that annual slingshot around the distant sun that mimics and imitates the affairs of humankind. The stresses of the season, the reason, the boldness of cold, and the hunkering down while glancing at calendars and counting of days until some semblance of warmth returns.
We still find (many of us) masked, tasked and wondering how long and in what distant era that may release us from the bonds of service to a creeping safety-ism we should have seen coming a long time ago. Those of us who still believe in fate nod along and persist in artist’s ways, sculpting back layers of normality while revealing the bare bones of the leftovers of another time. Otherwise known as the new normal.
I say nuts to that. It’s abnormal. It is not normal at all. There is nothing normal about what we do and how we do it, let alone why. Growing thousands of carnival campers cavorting across the public stage dressed and made up as fools and jesters, adorned in the trappings of a conformity many of us do not believe in with any sort of private conviction.
The fact that we are social animals makes us chafe, as well it should.
But really, I’m only here to have a brief chat about Zac Kriegman, a journalist fired by Thomson Reuters for not only expressing a valid opinion, but for telling an inconvenient truth. For expressing a critique of the fact that certain lives may very much matter, and for suspected reasons as to why they do so very much. While in other worlds and neighborhoods, lived experiences and socio-economic downward-cast communities, lives don’t seem to matter very much, at all.
Through all the din and racket, the yap and the yelp and the massed confusion of new gathered wisdoms that ignore as only ignorance can - my focused ears have caught, from time to time, the howl of pain over and about all those lives that don’t seem to matter. We should know that they do, whether they are ‘politically useful’ or not. They are no less lives not only connected to their own personal experience of life here on earth, but connected as well to rings radiating out, as a pebble tossed into a still deep pool. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, great aunts and uncles, siblings, cousins, close friends, and any other kind of social intimates as might apply.
That is a lot of victims of actual crime connected to legions of souls still alive and charged with carrying on this burden of living with a definition that does not make sense anymore. Certain lives matter and move majestically like kings and queens. While many more lives become otherized, marginalized, invisible and just plain erased, with barely a nod of recognition on any wider social scale.
Believe me, I cannot perform any act upon any stage at all that pretends to any inside information or experience of all of this. The very best I can ever do is give some semblance of an objective opinion. That’s true enough. Yet is it enough? I mean, how exactly do humans respond to this parade of tragedy that appears all dressed up with nowhere to go?
I have heard some pretty intelligent people comment that if these tragic victims were white, there would be a serious uproar across the land. It makes me wonder if the uproar that does spread across the land is perhaps, deep down in its roots, a response to all that tragedy - a tragedy so awful that it can’t be embraced or even directly acknowledged, for fear of possible consequences too powerful to contain.
I would like to think that. I would love to believe that when I hear the likes of Glenn Loury, in the midst of such a celebrated rant as he can deliver, bring up from the depths, like the finest horn solo ever imagined or performed, the genuine sound of real and actual outrage. And other things inside that sound so painfully private as to almost make me turn my ears away to give some space to the expression, and the need for its privacy.
As if it was let loose in the Grand Canyon, or even on the dark side of the moon, where none may hear (or almost no-one, anyway.) But of course we hear it. We hear it but our ears are not awake. They are budded or phoned or otherwise distracted. But damn. That sound is a sound I can listen to. It is a sound I can trust. It is a sound I can respect. It is a sound that can bounce my turpitude out of this cozy saftey-ism, and contemplate another side of life.
It is a sound that can provoke questions and answers, start up dialogue like that old chuggie boat engine that has ben too long wharved. Clouds and shrouds of black and blue smoke and then something some kind of different that promises a bit of momentum, something that might get us somewhere. But for now it seems all choked up and out of gas.
This year is still young. Young enough to tease with promises of change. Maybe even get that train that derailed some time ago, back on track. We all have places to go. That Freedom Train was a thing I dreamt about very young in life. I’m still not too old to believe that such a thing still matters. Perhaps right now, the thing that needs to ride that train the most, is just truth.